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    Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Marketing Theory, 21 (1), 2020, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2020 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Marketing Theory page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mtq on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/

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Lunch of the last human: Nutritionally complete food and the fantasies of market-based progress

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/03/2021
<mark>Journal</mark>Marketing Theory
Issue number1
Volume21
Number of pages22
Pages (from-to)3-24
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date7/04/20
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

In this article, we integrate Nietzsche’s visions of self-overcoming with a Žižekian toolbox to explore how ‘market-based progress’ is upheld through a fabric of ideological fantasies. Through an analysis of Huel, a nutritionally complete British food brand aligned with progressive and techno-utopian discourses, we reveal a fantasmatic structure centred on pragmatism, the search for unassailable truth and continuance of a prehistoric legacy. These fantasies function as illusory support for acceptance that humanity’s great overcoming is singularly achieved through market logic and ethos. Here, a fetishistic inversion centres on subjects believing that the detached spectatorialism of consumption is closer to the act of the Nietzschean ‘Overhuman’ than it is to its inverse, the ‘last human’. This article provides the parameters for how ideological fantasy insulates the market from its material deadlocks and concludes with a conceptualization of the post-sovereign consumer’s subjectification along the fantastical contours of market-based progress.

Bibliographic note

The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Marketing Theory, 21 (1), 2020, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2020 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Marketing Theory page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mtq on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/